Today when someone goes a few years between records or concerts, it’s assumed that he has grown weary of improvising an income for himself and his dependents and has accepted a university teaching position or taken a day job.īut few musicians ever disappear completely or put their horns away for good, even after learning the hard way that there’s very little chance for a big payoff in jazz. Years ago when a musician vanished from the scene, it was usually for one of two reasons: drugs, or steady work either making TV-ad soundtracks (“jingles”) in the recording studio or playing in the orchestras for films or Broadway shows, depending on which coast the person in question called home. Much of the romance of jazz improvisation is in its evanescence, and as if in keeping with that quality, jazz musicians themselves tend to disappear. And there was no hint of how long Rudd had been in the Catskills-the last I’d heard, he was teaching in Augusta, Maine, at a branch of the state university-or of what on earth he was doing there. There was no mention of Rudd’s having thrice been voted best trombonist in the magazine’s own International Jazz Critics Poll (in 1975, 1978, and 1979), or of his having finished no worse than seventh as recently as 1987, strictly on reputation: his last New York concert had been in 1983, and he hadn’t been featured on a new jazz release since his appearance on one track of That’s the Way I Feel Now (1984), the auteur record producer Hal Wilner’s double album of novel Thelonious Monk interpretations. The subject of “Pro Session” in December, 1990, was the pianist Herbie Nichols’s 1955 recording of his own “Furthermore.” The transcription and analysis were supplied by Rudd, who was identified as “a trombonist currently working in the Catskill Mountains at the Granit Hotel Kerhonkson, N.Y.” Toward the back of each issue that music magazine runs a feature called “Pro Session,” in which a recorded improvisation is transcribed and analyzed for the edification of readers who are themselves musicians. I was looking for Rudd, and I knew exactly where to find him, thanks to Down Beat. It would heighten the incongruity if I could say that I just walked in on this. Last summer I heard him sing “The Beer-Barrel Polka” as a member of a show band in a Borscht Belt resort and sound as though he was having a good time doing it. ROSWELL RUDD, a trombonist now in his late fifties, will, regardless of what he accomplishes or fails to in his remaining years, always be identified with the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, so indelible was his mark on it and its on him.
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